No Mercy (Blood War Book 4)

by Rod Carstens

  As they trotted to keep up with Mati, Minga asked, “Are Ura and Chucha here too, Lieutenant?”

  “Are you kidding? They wouldn’t miss it for all the money Von Fleet used to have.”

  Fenes slapped his neck as more bugs bit him. He was sweating heavily already.

  “Say, Lieutenant, what is this place, some kind of swamp?”

  “This, my young friends, used to be one of two bases where the old Marines went through boot camp. It’s called Parris Island. Somebody had the great idea that it would still make a good boot camp for today’s conscripts.”

  Fenes slapped another bug that was biting him. “No wonder the old Marines had such a nasty reputation. If I had to go through boot camp in a place like this, I would be mean as shit too.”

  Chapter 23

  Task Force 54

  Xotoli Battleship

  Direct Action Team

  Squad One

  Marga froze and looked more closely at the compartment. In the glare of her suit’s helmet light, it looked intact despite the damage in the passageway. Maybe it had been reinforced to survive an attack. The rest of the squad had spread out around her, carefully looking for something that would indicate the way to the engine room. The fact that the compartment had survived all of the explosions and was this deep inside the ship gave her reason to believe that this could at least indicate the way to the engine room.

  She saw no more movement and had almost convinced herself that she was seeing things when she definitely saw something moving in the compartment.

  “Movement,” she said over the squad tactical net.

  They had a survivor or survivors deep in the ship, either in or near their objective: the engine room. Fighting in zero-g was no easy task. Everything you had been taught was no longer true. There was no leverage, and if you fired a weapon with kickback, you were going for a ride unless you were anchored to the ship. She needed to get stable. She flipped on her boots and they found her footing, attaching to what had been a deck so she had a stable foundation.

  “Ground,” she ordered.

  The rest of the squad did the same, finding bulkheads or other surfaces that gave them a solid foundation. Marga reached into her vest, pulled a shaped charge out, and placed it onto the hatch in front of her.

  “Fire in the hole, fire in the hole, fire in the hole.”

  She set the charge off and the hatch was blown inward, filling the compartment with flying metal. In the hurricane rush of the escaping atmosphere, Marga stood and pulled the shotgun off her back, then fired three rounds blindly into the compartment before she moved forward. She waited until all the atmosphere had escaped, hoping that whatever she had seen was dead, killed by the loss of atomsphere.

  Moving carefully, her shotgun up and ready, she entered the hatch and crept forward in the darkness, the only light was the cone produced by her helmet. The reason she had only seen a fleeting glimpse of movement was this was an alcove with bulkheads on each side, creating a small passageway about ten feet long that opened into an immense compartment. In the glare of her headlamp she could see the type of huge equipment that you would normally see in an engine compartment for ships of this size.

  She was standing on a balcony that overlooked the room. It was close to twenty feet to the deck below, where she could see what appeared to be the housing for the huge crystals that powered this spacecraft. All manner of power cables, monitoring stations, walkways over large equipment, and piping ran everywhere, making it a darkened maze.

  “Fangs out, boys and girls. Something is in here.”

  Marga turned right and moved slowly, trying to make some sense of the layout. The squad alternated turning right and left as they entered the engine room, until there were two teams working their way through the huge space. Their magnetic boots were giving them a good foundation, so they could walk along the balcony and be able to fire their weapons without being thrown across the compartment.

  Marga had no idea what she was looking for in an alien engine compartment. She had been in enough Confederation ships during her years in the Legion to know what an engine room looked like, but what should she be looking for in a room filled with alien equipment and markings? Everything looked important since it was unfamiliar. How was she going to determine what did and didn't matter? She damn sure didn’t want to return to the ship empty-handed. She reached the end of the balcony over the deck and stopped to get an overview of the compartment and see if she could decide where to start her search.

  That was when she saw a Xotoli frantically working on a piece of equipment attached to a crystal housing.

  “Contact, front.”

  The Xotoli was in what appeared to be their version of an evac suit. It must have heard her transmission because its head snapped up faster than Marga thought possible. It jumped up at her in the zero gravity, and it was almost on top of her before she could pull the trigger of the shotgun. The shot caught it in the chest and head. The shotgun round ripped it apart in a cloud of debris, body parts, and what appeared to be black blood. There was enough force in the shell to overcome its forward momentum and knock it backwards. It somersaulted across the compartment in the zero-g until it struck the far bulkhead.

  The squad kept their weapons trained so they covered the entire compartment. No one moved for close to a minute. They just kept scanning. Then they started to sound off.

  “Clear.”

  “Clear.”

  When everyone had reported in and she knew the compartment was clear, she began to examine her surroundings. Now Marga had something to go on. What would an intelligent being in the last seconds of its life be trying to destroy that was so important?

  She turned her boots off and with a slight push floated over and down to where the alien had been working. The piece of equipment had no obvious use. It was attached to the crystal housing and had a display of some sort. A cable ran from it to the other two crystals.

  “This has got to be something,” Marga said. “Why else would duty dummy try and destroy it before we could get to it? Okay, my little nano friends. Go find out.”

  The chief engineer on the Phoenix had issued each of them a diagnostic nano kit that they used on their own equipment. She took out the pouch, which was full of hundreds of millions of engineering nanos, and carefully spread them with her armored hand over the piece of equipment, careful to cover the entire device.

  The nanos immediately found places to enter the machinery and disappeared into the oddly shaped, boxlike structure. It glowed green as they began to map the circuitry and electronics. The green glow left the box and moved through several conduits down the crystal toward other equipment, boxes, and circuits on the outside of the boxes until the compartment glowed a bright green. Marga glanced down at the monitor the engineer on the Phoenix had given her to wear on her vest. A huge amount of data was streaming into it back to the Phoenix. The nanos continued to spread out until the monitor on her chest vibrated. She looked down at the display and it read, “More nanos needed.”

  “Hey, Hamilton, bring me your nanos.”

  She added his nanos to the ones she had used. The green glow expanded until it reached a huge piece of equipment at the far end of the compartment. Again, the monitor vibrated and Marga added even more nanos to those already at work. Slowly, the huge piece of equipment glowed a bright green. Then the green light began to dim, just as the engineer had said it would. She glanced down at the display and it read, “Analysis complete.”

  “Okay, anybody got anything else that looks interesting?”

  The platoon net was filled with negatives.

  “Let’s make our hat,” Marga said.

  “Ririsa to Marga.”

  Nice, Marga thought. No “Phoenix Actual” or other code name in case there were still some systems listening.

  “This is Marga.”

  “Uh, our chief engineer is more than a little excited. He asks if you can cut off a couple of the boxes that you originally applied the
nanos to.”

  “Roger that.”

  “I got this one. Let’s pull the other two off,” Marga said over the platoon’s net.

  Marga pulled out a small laser cutter they had issued to all DAT team members in case they had to cut into Von Fleet compartments during their boarding inspections. It worked just as well on alien machinery. She cut the four bolts holding the box to the crystal housing and slipped it into her nano bag, which immediately sealed it and expanded to protect it from any damage during transport.

  “Okay, let’s give them a 3-D scan so we don’t have to come back.”

  Marga and the rest of the platoon turned on their armor’s laser scanners and slowly scanned the room. When they got back to the Phoenix, the techs could combine the scans and create a 3-D model of a Xotoli battleship’s engine room.

  “Boots off.”

  Marga turned her boots off, gently flexed her knees, so she floated up to the hatch they had entered the compartment. Their exfil was uneventful, and the swift boat was waiting. It returned them to the Phoenix.

  Marga had just gotten out of her armor and space suit when her personal comm vibrated and the face of Admiral Grogen appeared in front of her.

  “Sergeant, please report to my quarters.”

  That was strange. Ririsa was all business on the ship. What could she possibly want with Marga? The mission was over. The only thing worth mentioning was the Xotoli they’d found. Other than that all she’d done was pour a bunch of nanos into some machinery.

  She quickly put on a new set of utilities and headed for Flag Country. When she reached her compartment, two of her DAT teammates were standing guard on either side of the doors.

  “What gives?”

  “You’ve got us by the ass. She just wants to see you is all we know.”

  Marga knocked on the hatch.

  “Come.”

  Marga entered the compartment and stood at attention in front of Grogen’s desk.

  “Sergeant Marga Mathis, reporting as ordered.”

  Ririsa looked up from her display and said, “Marga, I can throw you into the shit and you always come up smelling like a rose.”

  “I don’t understand, Admiral.”

  “The chief engineer is about to cum in his pants. He and the whole engineering staff are pouring over the schematics and the 3-D scan your team transmitted. He thinks it may be the wormhole-creating device. He doesn’t understand a lot of it, but we have already sent the data to Earth, and even at first glance they think this is very important, even war-changing, information. I’m going to be forced to put you and your team in for citations. Good job, Marga.”

  Marga was actually at a loss for words for a moment. She had thought that being relegated to searching Von Fleet ships for hybrids meant she was not going to get a chance to really hurt these Xotoli. Now, with a simple board-and-search mission, she had had an effect on the whole war.

  “Not bad for an old Legionnaire they refused to rejuvenate,” Marga said.

  “No, it’s not. And I think I can convince the powers that be that you and the other DAT team members deserve rejuvenation after this mission. Only a bunch of experienced Legionnaires could have pulled this mission off. No matter how much training you give new recruits, they couldn't have entered a Xotoli ship and come back with the intel we needed so badly.”

  “How did the other teams do? We haven’t had a chance to debrief.”

  “Oh, they did very well too. But you caught the brass ring.”

  Marga let a big smile cross her face. “Thank you, Admiral. Can I tell the others about the rejuvenations?”

  “It’s not a done deal, but you can say I’m going to throw my weight around and I think I can pull it off. You may go.”

  Marga turned to leave, then stopped and said, “Thanks, Ririsa. This means a lot to us.”

  “Marga, it was my pleasure. You’ve earned it. Now get out of here. I’ve got work to do, old friend.”

  Marga practically ran out the door and told the two DATs standing guard the good news. She couldn’t stop smiling the rest of the way to the debriefing.

  Chapter 24

  Sol System

  Earth

  City-State of New York

  Operations Center of the Secretary General

  Admiral Ririsa Grogen and General Dasan Sand strode down the corridor side by side, two armored and armed marines in front and behind them for protection. The corridor was filled with men and women of all ranks hurrying in both directions, but when the two flag officers entered the corridor, the men and women stepped aside without being asked. Even among people used to seeing high-ranking officers, their presence created real excitement, because it meant the task force was back and Raurk had the forces she needed to defend Earth.

  The two stopped in front of the doors to the CIC, and the two Marines standing guard on either side of the hatch came to rigid attention and snapped off salutes. Sand glanced at the two and recognized both. They had been some of the first to become Marines after serving in the Legion. He gave them a small smile before he and Grogen leaned forward so the retinal scan could identify them. The doors opened into the CIC. It was fully staffed, with every station manned. In the center of the room was a situational display of the Sol system.

  Admiral Raurk was standing there with Rear Admiral Yasuji Kitmura, Istas, and Lieutenant Netis. When they walked in, she smiled and said, “Good to see you two.”

  Sand and Grogen said almost in unison, “Good to see you, Admiral.”

  Then Sand walked over to Netis and put out his hand. “I heard you were completely cleared, Lieutenant. It’s nice to have you on our side. Especially since you saved my life.”

  “You’re not the only one, General,” Admiral Raurk said. “She stopped an attempt on my life before they had a chance to even try. She has been a busy young lieutenant.”

  Netis smiled and said, “Thank you, ma’am, and sir. It was my pleasure.”

  “By the way, your briefings on the Xotoli have been invaluable for planning this fight,” Sand said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Then Sand glanced at the beautiful Anjin Istas. She was not in a uniform. She was wearing a black skintight jumpsuit that was the traditional attire for Anjins who are protecting a principal and don’t have to disguise themselves. “It's good to see you too. It's been a while.”

  “And you, General,” Istas said.

  “Are you taking care of Netis?”

  “Yes. The admiral has assigned me as her bodyguard. There are still those who don’t trust her.”

  “I don’t think Netis really needs one,” Sand replied.

  They all then turned to the 3-D display table.

  “I wish we had time to catch up,” Admiral Raurk said, “but we have got to get on with things. Time is running out. I’m going to start with you, General. As you requested, we have evacuated Manhattan, Long Island, and along the coast for a hundred miles. We are in the process of establishing the weapons and munitions caches as you requested. Now, I need a quick brief and then I’ll let you get on with your duties.”

  Sand touched the 3-D display and zoomed in on Earth and then down to a detailed view of New York. He looked up at Lieutenant Netis and said, “I need to make sure I understand the Xotoli leader and how he thinks. Now, from your briefings, am I correct in assuming that the Xotoli will not destroy New York from space? Instead, it will be their primary ground target, because the secretary general is here. Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir. They can’t take the chance of killing him with munitions. It has to be by the hand of Askars. He must kill the secretary general himself or he will not get the credit.”

  “That seems like a very primitive belief for a race that has conquered so much space.”

  “It may be, but it is their belief, and their whole lives are wrapped around their position in their warrior generation. The higher they are in status, the richer they are and the more power they have. It’s a critical belief in their socie
ty. In fact I would say it is central. It’s not that much different than human society, only you measure someone’s stature by how much money they accrue. I’ve studied enough of human history to know that in the past military generals have been considered leaders even when they’ve left the military. So it is not that different if you think about it.”

  Sand was silent for a moment then said, “Okay, that makes more sense to me. So it is also safe for me to assume that they won’t destroy naval headquarters and the secretary general’s building, or for that matter New York, with conventional weapons from space either. They can’t assume the secretary general is in his headquarters. Instead they are going to want to dig him out if they have to pull New York apart brick by brick.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So I have to stop them from doing that while we’re looking for Askars.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And if we kill him, they’ll stop fighting and leave,” Sand said directly to Netis. “It's hard for me to wrap my head around that one. Normally a military organization has a well-understood chain of command so if a leader is lost they know exactly who will be in charge next.”

  “There are precedents among certain peoples throughout your history. Some of the American Indians had such a belief. When the war chief was killed in battle they retreated to elect a new chief,” Netis said firmly.

  Sand stood there as if he were considering just how much he could depend on her analysis.

  “Okay. I’ll go with that. Now, if I was this Askars and looking at the terrain, I would like not to have to worry about my back. If I landed my troops on the continent, I would have to use troops to guard against attack from my rear. So instead if I landed them on Long Island and made the whole island my forward operating base, I could focus on Manhattan and the Confederation complex. With the ocean at my back, I could easily set up defenses and have a good shot at holding off any attacking forces. I’m going to assume our boy is smart and has fought a lot of battles. So I’m going to fortify as far north as this park—what’s it called?” Sand pointed to a large, green rectangle on Manhattan.